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Koko Ricky

Anyone else have this problem with connecting with modern games?

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With Far Cry 2 having 50 km square maps; how big will future maps be? Could you literally have a 500 km square map that the whole game takes place in? Although gameplay is a consideration as well as huge landscapes and the ability to set forest fires and drive along highways to the next mission point. But could future FPS games have maps the size of a US state? And would this be a good thing?

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Very unlikely. I think last generation we passed a critical threshold where such expectations are placed on presentation/visual detail which starts to conflict with the amount of time and work needed for the game world.

A perfect timeline to demonstrate this trend is the Elder Scrolls series. The first games have truely massive worlds, yet the content is mostly filled with mundane randomly generated areas without much of a personal touch. From Morrowind and onward, each new installment has seen things like cities and their inhabitants shrink more and more as the visual fidelity increases, and in turn the work needed for those visuals.

I think there are only a select few cases where you can still have games of such massive scopes, but they'd need help from some comprehensive middleware (such as speedtree and the likes), but the loss detail would be apparent. You can see this in Just Cause 2 which has a pretty big open world by modern standards, but a lot of people complained about much of that being little more than filler content.

Another thing to consider is that the entirety of World of Warcraft's estimated real world size is about as big as the Isle of Wright, south of Great Britain.

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Start watching gaming channels on YouTube, then start sniffing around Steam, gog.com, and the Humble Bundles. You'll find dozens if not hundreds of games you want to play.

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Danarchy said:

Start watching gaming channels on YouTube, then start sniffing around Steam, gog.com, and the Humble Bundles. You'll find dozens if not hundreds of games you want to play.

Apparently, I'm immune to this type of psychotropic programming.
After watching tons of modern gaming channels on YouTube, I still turn back to searching for new fan-made content of old gems.
But perhaps that's just me being my freaky self. Meh.

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I play some modern games...
They are mainly ok... With some bad ones.

I got to say that Halo is a guilty pleasure of mine even though 343 industries is gradualy making it worse... somehow.

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I dunno if this post can be taken seriously, but I think I was brought up during a time where games like Mortal Kombat and Doom were bridging the gap between obviously unrealistic and playful 2D Platformers, to realistically violent and "believable" games. I became attracted to how well games were simulating real things like 3D architecture and blood splatters. Then Quake comes out, which uses a successful true 3D engine, where the possibilities of simulating real life architecture is pretty much endless. Since then other games have adapted 3D engines, and games like Half-Life 2 came out showcasing realistic physics. It held my attention for a couple years after that, where I had been subscribing to some video game magazines and looking at screenshots and reading reviews.

But at this point it seems like it's gotten to a standstill. We've seen true 3d engines, so I'm not really sure what anyone is supposed to be striving for. At this point, the only thing we're getting are 3d engines that can display larger environments faster, and can display microscopic details at the same time, with every release doing the same thing marginally better than the last. These things don't really aid the elements of gameplay, and to this day, games like Doom and Quake don't really give me any trouble in believing that the maps could be a real place. It puts enough pieces of the puzzle together to make me feel immersed in the game, so the pursuit for higher detail and more realism does not appeal to me at all.

This isn't really related to the above, but id Software marketed it's products in the 90's as being "Intense, and badder, and harder" than the games before it and you should be scared to play it, and expect to be challenged. Doom II: The Master Levels for example. It seems now games are being marketed as "more balanced and more fair" than the game before. What have we become?

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neubejiita said:

With Far Cry 2 having 50 km square maps; how big will future maps be?


Just Cause 2's map is 400sq mi (20mi x 20mi, or about 1,000sq km)..and it's HUGE. Crossing one side to the other even via jet or plane can take you up to 10 real minutes.

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40oz said:

This isn't really related to the above, but id Software marketed it's products in the 90's as being "Intense, and badder, and harder" than the games before it and you should be scared to play it, and expect to be challenged. Doom II: The Master Levels for example. It seems now games are being marketed as "more balanced and more fair" than the game before. What have we become?

People just want to experience an interactive action movie these days.

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GeckoYamori said:

Hopefully this is just another phase the industry is going through and we're going to look back on this period with the same distaste as we do for 90's FMV games. Or we'll get some revision history where those were in fact brilliant games too far ahead of their time to be appreciated for their cinematic ambitions.


For me the "industry" has been completely irrelevant for like 20 years already. Not only because I got older, but also because I made a complete switch to Unix-based systems around the time Commodore/Amiga went belly up and Win95 came out. Around the same time, I also stopped caring about console systems because it seemed there was a lot of hype around FMV and 3D polygon games (which to me looked like complete ass, and still do for the most part). And arcades and pinball machines started getting rarer too.

In the 80's and early 90's I used to read the magazines, follow the new releases, etc. But once I felt things were changing in a direction I didn't like, I stopped caring. It's the same way with other stuff too... I used to be heavily into tabletop RPG gaming, but around the time TSR was dying, and the CCG's started taking over, I stopped caring. I didn't buy any more new stuff, because I didn't have any interest whatsoever in what was being released. To this day I still don't know how to play M:TG, or know wtf a pokemon is. And quite frankly, I don't give a rat's ass. ;-)

But I'm not special in that regard. One day you'll stop caring too. There will be a shift so that your preferences are not longer in sync with the contemporary trends, and you'll either drive yourself crazy wondering why the games suck so much, or you'll stop caring altogether and just play the ones you enjoy.

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40oz said:

IThis isn't really related to the above, but id Software marketed it's products in the 90's as being "Intense, and badder, and harder" than the games before it and you should be scared to play it, and expect to be challenged. Doom II: The Master Levels for example. It seems now games are being marketed as "more balanced and more fair" than the game before. What have we become?

Adults with full time jobs.

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Despite being numerous succinct explanations of the situation concerning modern games by people like Jodwin in this very thread there's ten more twats following with the comment. "Hurr, I dun like them modurn gejmz." Of course talking about a very limited fraction of modern games as if they were representative of the entire market making themselves look like a right idiot in the process.

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I was born in 1980, played Lode Runner on a Macintosh when I was three/four years old, had an Atari 2600, owned a NES in 1985/86, had an Amiga 500, then SNES in 1991, a 486 PC soon after. You can see why I'm brainwashed into thinking that classic games were simply better.

I started to lose interest around the same time as the original poster, early 2000's. The last games I remember playing the living crap out of were Baldur's Gate II and Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, oh, and Diablo 2.

Things that bothered me the most:

-The shift to 3D only games. Remember Symphony of the Night? I remember magazine critics complaining that it wasn't 3D, and yet it stands out as one of the best games from the late 90's, despite is lack of "innovation."

-Nintendo in the N64 era losing most of its best third party developers because of their refusal to use the CD format. Nintendo was King to me since I was five, and it was hard to accept that the N64 wouldn't have all the best Capcom, Konami (other than the 3D Castlevanias), and Sqaure games.

-The PC in the early 2000's was still riding a wave of generic RTS Warcraft/C&C clones. And also the focus of most of the best companies shifted to online only multiplayer/no single player games. I never thought of video games as social media. For many, this is when their interest in gaming began, but I wasn't interested. I especially found pointless the FPS games where all you do is shoot at other user controlled players and then everyone immediately respawns after dying.

-And finally, the generic We Wish We Made Hollywood Movies syndrome. I know that most game developers are nerds, and love fantasy/sci-fi movies as well. But I always kept these separate in my mind. I hate seeing hammy or wooden acting from 3D rendered, not human enough faces, spouting cheesy lines when all I really want to do is play the damn game.

Take all the above with a grain of salt. These are simply my experiences and opinions, and I'm sure that there are good games being made today and many exceptions to what I'm talking about. Hey, Cave Story was awesome. ;)

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bimlanders said:

the generic We Wish We Made Hollywood Movies syndrome.


This kind of thing makes me very angry. Games are interactive, that is the medium's strength and what it offers over all other media; to sacrifice any of that and ape what another media will always be able to offer a superior experience of, seems stupid and not playing to the media's strengths.

I love movies. I love games. A traditional part of me (not a conservative part, I will protest) likes to keep the pair separate because I expect very different things from them.

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ape what another media will always be able to offer a superior experience of


I've enjoyed watching someone play through the Last of Us more than anything Hollywood released in the last decade. Wouldn't want to play it, but it was great fun looking at it.

It's annoying when people praise such games as the pinnacle of videogaming, no doubt. There can be so much more to the genre.

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Dead Island and Sleeping Dogs are very fun to play but quite boring to watch, I also think AvP and Serious Sam 3 were fun but short games.

The problem most people have is only concentrating on the drab and boring well known games like the overated fish-stick games or the over triple A (lol) titles instead of less worshiped, but fun, other games and genres.

An example would be a game called Starsector (I think) which is a 2D space game where you command your own fleet, you can even take direct control of certain ships during combat (Like the X series of games), you gain your ships by building, buying, boarding or having them given to you in exchange for the enemies lives. The odd thing is that this game is only in its alpha stages but shows high potential with a already huge mod community!

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It's really just that modern games are boring as shit. I lived with a kid who played CoD:MW for hours after he got home from school, and the majority of what he did was hide behind things while his health regenerated. What exactly is fun about that? In Doom I kill roughly 7000 things per second. In CoD you might kill that many things in one whole game.

Plus the mechanics suck ass. Doom's mobility is unrivaled in the modern era, but that's really just because devs used to care about game mechanics. Think about baller games like Sonic, F-Zero, Mega Man, etc. Playing those games is instantly fun, and the better you get at the mechanics, the more rewarding it is. I'm guessing that framerate issues prevent devs from writing "fast" games; and that's a real shame. I really don't give a fuck about leaves or water reflections. That's what "the real" is for.

Maybe the best example of "modern games are boring" is (and I hate to turn this into one of THOSE threads) the slow death of the Final Fantasy series. Don't get me wrong, even the SNES FF's had flaws (waaaaay too easy, for one), but holy shit. FF13 seriously has 20 hours with a character (named "Hope", seriously) WHINING and BAWLING the whole time. FF12 was a great game, then they stuck Vaan in it, whose sole purpose in life is to be a little bitch and whine about life. FF10 is legit just a piece of shit, the best part about it is blitzball, which they should have just made a totally separate game and not bothered with the rest. Also surprise surprise, Tidus is also a little bitch who actually cries, multiple times if I remember. Someone please bring back Kefka so he can Bolt3 these little kids to death. Who thought constant crying was something that gamers wanted to experience?

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As long as other game developers stop trying to copy it, CoD can last forever for all the fucks I give. Works pretty well as a quarantine for people with terrible taste in games.

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Ladna said:

bawwwwww

Stop playing shitty games and pretending that they're the be-all, end-all of "modern gaming".

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What should I play? PS I don't have any consoles past ps2 anymore (sold), so PC/Android or emulator only.

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Jodwin said:

Stop playing shitty games and pretending that they're the be-all, end-all of "modern gaming".


You make your opinion sound pretty stupid when you put it like that. "Hey guys, the games you play are bad, but I'm terrified you might find the games I play to be just as bad, so I won't name them as to be able to be condescending from this undefined space where you don't know what games I like and so you can't argue they're not good". Three posts in, you'd think you'd have moved on from your original point and started to provide examples. You know, something to base a discussion on besides hot air.

To be fair, it is a pretty stupid opinion regardless. Just because you or I can connect with some modern games doesn't mean everyone could, or should. It takes a fairly narrow-minded person to assume enjoyment in entertainment is an universal thing.

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I suppose Jodwin could have phrased it better, but the post he was responding to was pretty much "after playing Call of Duty and some of the newer Final Fantasy games, I've decided that modern games suck". The newer Final Fantasy games aren't considered good and CoD is, at best, controversial.

Still, if you want examples of good modern AAA games I could list a few (picked mostly from my steam list):

The Arkham Series
Deus Ex Human Revolution
Driver San Francisco
Far Cry 3 (and Blood Dragon)
Alpha Protocol
Fallout New Vegas
Dark Souls
The Walking Dead
The Saints Row Series
Just Cause 2
XCOM Enemy Unknown

You might not like all of them, but you should like enough of them to have a good time with newer titles.

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Captain Red said:

Deus Ex Human Revolution
Far Cry 3 (and Blood Dragon)
Alpha Protocol
The Saints Row Series
Just Cause 2
XCOM Enemy Unknown

I've played these. Liked all of them.

At the very least I'd add Mirror's Edge and Alan Wake to that list.

I guess all modern games must be awesome.

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I thought Just Cause 2 was alright but it does get to be horribly repetative.

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I really enjoyed Dishonored but X-Com was probably the most fun I've had in a long time playing games, though I don't think it classifies as an AAA title.

A few other good ones I enjoyed include but are not limited to, Deus ex HR (already mentioned), Torchlight 2, Borderlands 2. It's controversial some people don't like the gameplay, but I felt that it was more Doom and Quake than the last Doom and Quake games, I enjoy the bulletsponges since that usually means that you have to work a bit on your positioning and not just go for potshots from cover.

But those games are all pretty much all known to anyone with even a fleeting interest in PC gaming.

The gold is in the indie game market. I got so many good games that I can't list them all but I'll list a few of the ones I really enjoyed over the last couple of years.

Cogs - Simple puzzle game involving little machines with cogs and steam.
Giana Sisters, Twisted dreams - Sweet looking 2D platformer with 3D graphics and fun game play.
Dustforce - Speedrunning 2D platformer with tight visual design.
Antichamber - original and peculiar FP puzzler.
Renegade Ops - Top down 3D shooter with campy story and graphic novel cutscenes.
Legend Of Grimrock - First Person RPG Dungeon Crawler harking back to golden oldies like Black Crypt and Knightmare.
Osmos - 2D puzzle/action game focusing on the concept of cause and effect.
Stealth Bastard - It's Free and it's a really cool 2D steal action puzzle game.
Frozen Synapse - Hard to explain but it's really cool. Very tactical and strategic 3rd person counterstrike game.
Shank 1 and 2 - Visceral 2D beat em up.


bah....

Machinarium, Lone Survivor, Snapshot, Tomas was alone, Super meat boy, They bleed pixels, Jamestown, Intrusion 2, Capsized, Amnesia the dark descent, Gratitious space battles, FTL, Tower of guns, Trine 1 and 2 etc etc.

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Phml said:

You make your opinion sound pretty stupid when you put it like that. "Hey guys, the games you play are bad, but I'm terrified you might find the games I play to be just as bad, so I won't name them as to be able to be condescending from this undefined space where you don't know what games I like and so you can't argue they're not good". Three posts in, you'd think you'd have moved on from your original point and started to provide examples. You know, something to base a discussion on besides hot air.

To be fair, it is a pretty stupid opinion regardless. Just because you or I can connect with some modern games doesn't mean everyone could, or should. It takes a fairly narrow-minded person to assume enjoyment in entertainment is an universal thing.

Age of Empires Online
Antichamber
Awesomenauts
Bastion
Chivalry: Medieval Warfare
Cthulhu Saves the World
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Dungeons of Dredmor
Dust: An Elysian Tail
Etrian Odyssey -series
Fallout: New Vegas
Far Cry 3
Far Cry: Blood Dragon
Fire Emblem: Awakening
Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams
Intrusion 2
Jamestown
Legend of Grimrock
Melty Blood Actress Again
Orcs Must Die!
Saints Row The Third
Scrolls
Spec Ops: The Line
Terraria
Thomas Was Alone
Torchlight 2
Trine 2

Happy?

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kristus said:

I really enjoyed Dishonored ...

It took me quite a while to forgive that game for promising to be next-gen Thief. It had developers from Thief, it has leaning like Thief and it even looks a bit like Thief sometimes, but if you actually try to play it like Thief you're in for a pretty boring slog. Your not a Thief, you're an Assassassin (the extra ass is for asshole) and as long as you remember that, it's a fun game. Inviting comparisons to Thief just made me remember how amazing the world building, characters and level design in the Thief games where compared to Dishonoreds. It was Bioshock all over agian.

What I'm saying is, I miss rope arrows :(

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Danarchy said:

Start watching gaming channels on YouTube, then start sniffing around Steam, gog.com, and the Humble Bundles. You'll find dozens if not hundreds of games you want to play.


Speaking of which, my Steam library is full of them. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.

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If people hate modern games so much, why do they insist on having powerful computers built to run them?

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